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Boredoms, the long-running Japanese noise and experimental music group, have always had a strange popularity. They are probably the only band who prefaced a career on Warner Bros. Records by releasing an EP called Anal by Anal. (They have since moved to the indie label Thrill Jockey.) But Bostonist was still taken by surprise when we learned that their Saturday show at the Paradise Rock Club had sold out. People have listened to this band's music, right?
It turns out that people had. From the band's crazy instrumentation (three drumsets, no guitar or bass, a seven necked guitar monstrosity known as "Sevena") to the cracked vocal performance of singer Yamantaka Eye (whose doesn't write lyrics so much as extemporize a gibberish jeremiad), the packed house dug the Boredoms. To a point.
The evening started with Northampton Wools, a duo consisting of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and experimentalist Bill Nace. They took the name from a yarn emporium in Western Mass. It was appropriate. They sat closely across from one another and did not play their guitars so much as knit them, each using both hands to pluck across the fretboard. The result had a percussive brio that brought to mind a thumb piano duet.
Moore moved his body like a serpent around the guitar in his lap, settling into a hunched ease that recalled the Peanuts character Schroeder. He still had his 1980s haircut.
Sadly, the performance was out of scale for the sold out venue, and its three quarters hour length dwarfed the crowd's attention span. Restless gabbing began halfway through the set and continued as the duo left the stage for the Boredoms' roadie, a man in track pants and a jaunty scarf who tested each of the band's instruments as if to ensure that they were set to "Weird." A cheer cut through the crowd when the drapes were lifted off Sevena. The Boredoms were about to begin.
Eye took the stage holding a pair of orbs in either hand, instruments that lit up as he shook them and produced a rumbling electronic feedback. With the stage lights off, he looked like a man trapped in an unfinished Nikola Tesla experiment.
The feedback quickly morphed into a regular electronic pulse that steadily gained intensity until the stage lights were thrown on and the three drummers tore into it. Eye dropped the orbs and attacked Sevena with a drumstick, filling the venue with clashing peals of rock guitar. The three drummers quickly fell into time like a drumline. The tone for the performance was set.
The drummers played like clockwork, a tight ensemble. They had incredible stamina, drumming almost continuously throughout the performance, which lasted well over an hour. While most of the drumming was a matter of keeping in time with each other -- playing a variety of complicated rock patterns -- the music did venture into the unusual. One passage had the martial but improvisatory character of kumi-daiko, ensemble taiko performance. Another shifted into polyrhythms like West African drumming.
The female drummer, Yoshimi P-We, played a synthesizer keyboard located next to her drumkit and was responsible for one of the funniest moments of the night: a loose jam that sounded like a careless blend of J-pop and a Texas hoedown. One woman in the crowd responded with a New Englander's approximation of square dancing, an elbow-throwing variation on the jogging-in-place dance that she had been doing.
Eye, a compact man with dreadlocks over his shoulders, wandered the stage like an itinerant. He wore a walking cast, which gave him an air of hazard.
He played Sevena as percussion, using a variety of drumsticks and eliciting different sounds with each. Played with brushes, for example, the instrument vibrated with a series of droning tones, somewhere between a guitar left against an amplifier and a glass harmonica. When he used regular drumsticks, the instrument emitted chunks of detuned rock, like an indie band from the 90s. A roadie sat behind Sevena, retuning the instrument when Eye turned his attention elsewhere.
Besides Sevena, Eye played a synthesizer operated by joystick. And he shouted. He carried a wireless microphone, which looked like it was made from the heavy duty plastic you see in emergency flashlights. His lyrics were visceral exclamations (a sampling: "Boog boog boog. Blai! Ha. Blai! Ha. Say eet ababahahaha!"), and, when he got really into it, he would slam the microphone into his throat and let out a scream like a demented parody of Prince.
At one point, Eye lumbered toward the crowd, with one hand outstretched and the microphone in the other. "Hey!" he yelled. "Hey!" the crowd responded. Eye had not been talking to them. It was a little awkward.
Toward its conclusion, the performance couldn't surmount its limitations. It was just a dude screaming while three people played nearly identical patterns on drumkits: an indulgence to endure, like the third side of a double LP. The crowd's attention dissipated, but if the show closed on a boring note, nobody could say they hadn't been warned.
Photos by Courtney Lockemer.
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The Boredoms are wicked awesome! I thought it was a great show.